A Spark From Embers
Book One, Tears of Flames Series
A spark smolders within every fading ember. Awaiting the right moment to reignite. To blaze into an inferno.
Eighteen-year-old Sadie’s fiery ambitions have faded to embers. Her dreams of escaping the shackles of her conventional life and seeking heroic adventures have been doused by an arranged marriage. Women in 1914 were expected to be Helen of Troy, not Achilles. Doomed to the life of obscurity she always feared, Sadie takes a chance on an anonymous note - and finds a mirror portal to Arwé, the parallel world featured in her shunned great-grandfather’s book.
But when she steps through, the portal closes behind her.
Cut off from her brother Connor and stuck with Tristan, the enigmatic man sent to guide her to Arwé, Sadie learns it will take more than trading the mundane for the magical to reignite the embers of her heart. Controversial fire and forbidden celestial magics threaten to consume her, layered secrets mask friend from foe, and she’s caught in a civil war she inadvertently accelerated. Walking through that portal should have been freeing. Empowering. So why did she feel more trapped?
Convinced his sister is gone forever, Connor enlists in a war he doesn’t believe in. Before long, he uncovers a dark conspiracy rooted in emerging electrical science.
When her enemies offer her the chance to return home, Sadie discovers not even her wild imagination has prepared her for the sobering reality of what happens when you play with fire.
A SPARK FROM EMBERS is The Ten Thousand Doors of January meets the Narnia series, except if Lucy had gone through the wardrobe alone, leaving Edmund to enlist and battle the demons of his inner Witch.
A Ballad of hate and hope
Book 0.5, Tears of Flames Series
Hope has no beginning, and no end.
As a Lantíé with both antlers and wings, and a Storyteller able to recall stories from the past, Nensola has always felt like an anomaly. Dark shadows of her peryton ancestors prowl the peripheries of her soul, threatening to consume her if she loses control. When her mom is murdered by pirates to harvest the magic in her wings, Nensola struggles to lead with hope.
Sailing the West Indies in 1715, Kit is determined not to let his pirate stepfather die to claim a prize for the device he stole. He has always felt unanchored between Spanish and English cultures, harbouring hate for his parents’ deaths. When Kit falls through a maelstrom portal into the world of Arwé and meets Nensola, his anchor begins to lower.
While hope burgeons in Nensola and Kit’s hearts, hate festers on the borders. Just when Kit finally feels he belongs, he is cast adrift, faced with the prospect of returning to Earth. With her home and people threatened by a sinister force, and her trust in Kit uncertain, Nensola fears hate’s grip on her heart is stronger than the clinging droplet of hope.
But even a droplet can create ripples. And all it takes is a ripple to change the world.
A Ballad of Hate and Hope is a prequel novella taking place almost two hundred years before the events in A Spark From Embers - volume one in the fantasy series, Tears of Flame.
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